Deidre Henderson watched in surprise as her party waged one attack after another on mail voting in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
For the better part of three years, Republicans, led by former President Donald Trump, have repeated claims that mail voting is unsafe and ripe for fraud. GOP leaders took aim at mail voting in state legislatures and the party’s new House majority drafted legislation to rein in the practice.
Only in June did the Republican National Committee launch an official campaign to encourage early voting — including by mail — ahead of the 2024 presidential election. It was a welcome, if overdue, shift in the narrative, according to Henderson, the top election official in Utah, a Republican-led state that has long-since embraced mail voting as a safe and secure way to cut costs and increase voter participation.
